Readings and musings

I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Bruce Feiler speak at Google about his book The Secrets of Happy Families. I expected to hear some of the traditional/cliché advice and have it be very prescriptive, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. Bruce dug up some interesting research and spent his time visiting with families all over the world to find out some commonalities of things that should be done and also avoided.

Below are some of my notes on the talk. I look forward to reading his book sometime soon.

Biggest learning from positive psychology is that biggest source of happiness is relationships

High functioning families adapt all the time

Constantly forced to change and react

Rarely able to be proactive

Kid number one wish is for parents to be less stressed

Weekly family agile meetings

Public accountability

Morning checklist with list of everyone's obligations

Weekly Sunday meeting

3 questions

What worked well

What didn't work well

What will we agree to work on in week ahead

All give ideas

Vote on 2 to work on

Gives access to innermost child thoughts

Let kids with adult supervision pick their own rewards and punishments

Don't have to discuss all battles in the moment but can resolve on Sunday

Be mindful of how function as a family

Have to empower your kids

Have kids set own work plans, evaluate selves

Builds up their brains from fmri research

Parents don't have all the answers

Allow kids to criticize their parents and let off steam

Second big idea: talk a lot

High functioning teams have a lot of communication

Talk about what it means to be part of your family

Talked to Jim Collins

Preserve the core and stimulate progress

Define core identity

Creating family mission statement

Talk to kids about what they think our family values are

Family dinner

It is nice if can do it but the core part of the convo can be moved to family breakfast or meal out on weekend or whenever